Thursday 5 Oct.
Aula Magna | Palazzo Gravina | DiARC
Via Monteoliveto 3, Naples

Friday 6 Oct.
Porta del Parco, Via Diocleziano 341, Naples
Lido Pola Common, Via Nitida 24, Naples

On 5^th and 6^th October, the International Conference of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) “Urban Conflicts and Peace: The Everyday Politics of the Commons” will take place in Naples. Developed within the activities of the AESOP Thematic Group “Public Spaces and Urban Cultures”, the initiative is organized by the Institute for Research on Innovation and Services for Development of the National Research Council of Italy (Cnr Iriss), in collaboration with the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus – Senftenberg, the Laboratory of  Ecological Design of Settlements  (LaPEI) of the University of Florence, the Department of Architecture of the University of Naples Federico II, Lido Pola – Common, and the Government Commissioner Structure for the environmental reclamation and urban regeneration of the site of national interest Bagnoli Coroglio.

Conference Theme

The two-day conference aims to reflect on the politics of commons as inherently bound to the ways and means of how urban societies negotiate between urban conflicts and peace. The goal is to conceptualize the relationship between conflict and peace beyond their usual perception as a binary pair. For peace can maintain imbalances in power relations which might violently affect parts of the urban population, as much as urban conflicts might open the opportunity for more democratic participation and the recognition of differences. In the realm of politics, conflicts may shape a transformative public sphere which contests the given unjust conditions and renegotiates meanings and actions. In this perspective, the conference wants to develop an in-depth reflection on everyday politics of commons.

Indeed, commons display how societies have contested, innovated, produced, and governed differently – they are integral part of an everyday construction of urban peace in which power relations are continuously rebalanced. They allow for a profound insight into assemblages of institutional and social actors and their daily interactions unfolding in the range of practices and settings, from the micro level of informal improvised tactics to the structured institutionalized settings of urban politics. At the same time, they extend the field of exploration to settlements, services and organizations that do not fully fit into the institutionally demarcated framework of city-making, and which can build the city in a different way. To grasp these transformative moments of agency and to understand contentious acts of publics as political, the conference aims to interpret commons through various epistemologies, theories, and practices, including – but not limited to – those from the Global South or from the feminist perspective on the city. Indeed, commons display how peace is constructed, how societies arrive at peace in everyday life, and how urban space mould the understanding of what kind of peace societies aim to arrive at.

Conference structure 

Thursday 5 October, from 9.00 CET, opening sessions, keynote lecture and parallel sessions will be hosted by the Department of Architecture of University Federico II at Palazzo Gravina (Via Monteoliveto, 3 Naples). After institutional greetings, the four co-organizers, Gabriella Esposito (Cnr Iriss), Stefania Ragozino (Cnr Iriss), Tihomir Viderman (BTU Cottbus – Senftenberg) and Chiara Belingardi (LaPEI), Conference scientific coordinators, will briefly describe the ratio of this conference within the ten-year project of the Thematic Group “Public Spaces and Urban Cultures” and then will introduce objective, themes, and structure of the conference. The anthropologist Maria Anita Palumbo, Associate Professor in Human and Social Sciences at the School of Architecture and Landscape of the University of Lille, will deliver the lecture “Beyond war and peace: few words on the diplomatic power of communing”, a political reading of actions in/on public spaces revealing processes of negotiation aiming at establishing a better cohabitation with others, with nature, and the built environment. Then, nine panels will be run through three parallel sessions.

Friday 6 October, a mobile workshop in the Bagnoli neighborhood will be the occasion to visit the Site of National Interest Bagnoli-Coroglio, an important factory district based on the activity of the Ilva-Italsider, third steel industry centre in Italy, which closed in 1993. Since then, an important requalification project – still ongoing – started aimed at the environmental rehabilitation and urban regeneration of this broad area, reclaimed by its inhabitants and civic associations. The focus of discussion will be on results achieved and next actions to be taken to support the regeneration process of the area. In this context, the activities to build a permanent urban laboratory in the area developed by Lido Pola Common in collaboration with Cnr Iriss will be presented. The architect and activist Stavros Stavrides, Professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, will take the lecture “Commoning power in a city of thresholds”:  through concrete examples from Europe and Latin America, he will try to show that explicit and implicit efforts for collective emancipation may construct cities of commoning as emerging cities of thresholds.

Scientific Committee

Stefania Ragozino, CNR-IRISS, Italy | Chiara Belingardi, LaPEI, Italy | Luisa Bravo, City Space, Architecture, Italy | Carlo Cellammare, University Sapienza, Italy | Nadia Charalambous, University of Cyprus, Cyprus | Maria Cerreta, University Federico II, Italy | Massimo Clemente, CNR-IRISS, Italy | Marcella Corsi, University Sapienza, Italy | Maria Francesca De Tullio, University Federico II, Italy | Gabriella Esposito De Vita, CNR-IRISS, Italy | Sabine Knierbein, TU Wien, Austria | Karina Landman, University of Pretoria, South Africa | Christine Mady, Aalto University, Finland | Giuseppe Micciarelli, University of Salerno, Italy | Stefania Oppido, CNR-IRISS, Italy | Maria Anita Palumbo, Université Lille Nord de France | Ivo Rendina, CNR-ISASI, Italy | Nikolai Roskamm, University of Applied Sciences Erfurt, Germany | Michelangelo Russo, University Federico II, Italy | Mohamed Saleh, University of Groeningen, The Netherlands | Ceren Sezer, RWTH, German | Socrates Stratis, University of Cyprus, Cyprus | Tihomir Viderman, BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany | Maria Patrizia Vittoria, CNR-IRISS, Italy | Burcu Yigit Turan, SLU, Sweden

Organizing Committee

Stefania Oppido, CNR-IRISS, Italy | Chiara Belingardi, LAPEI, Italy | Gabriella Esposito De Vita, CNR-IRISS, Italy | Stefania Ragozino, CNR-IRISS, Italy  | Tihomir Viderman, BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany

Technical Committee

Valeria Catanese, Antonio Marino, Emanuela Motta, Marta Moracci, Federica Morra, Angela Petrillo, CNR-IRISS, Italy

Contacts

Stefania Ragozino, s.ragozino@iriss.cnr.it

Valeria Catanese, v.catanese@iriss.cnr.it

Organizzato da:
Cnr Iriss
Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus – Senftenberg
Laboratory of Ecological Design of Settlements (LaPEI) of the University of Florence
Department of Architecture of the University of Naples Federico II
Government Commissioner Structure for the environmental reclamation and urban regeneration of the site of national interest Bagnoli Coroglio
Lido Pola – Common

Referente organizzativo:
Stefania Ragozino
CNR – Istituto di Ricerca su Innovazione e Servizi per lo Sviluppo
s.ragozino@iriss.cnr.it

Modalità di accesso: ingresso libero
Working sessions and keynote lectures are open to public.
Access to coffee break and lunch is reserved to people registered at the Conference and visit.

Vedi anche:

• Flyer
• Programme_Oct. 5
• Detailed Programme_Panels_Oct. 5
• Programme_Oct. 6
• Keynote Speakers